The combination of dried fruits and ready-to-eat cereal products, being dry and having relatively low water activities, tends to further desiccate the dry fruit. After a short time untreated dry fruit for example, raisins, bananas, peaches and the like tend to become unacceptably hard or at least become tough when packaged in the presence of dry products such as ready-to-eat cereals. The fruit which has been dehydrated sufficiently to prevent spoilage, is of the magnitude as to make the dried fruit generally unappetizing and unacceptable. To overcome this problem, the use of edible humectants to maintain the dried fruit in a softer more desirable condition over extended periods of time is well known and widely reported. A number of processes have been disclosed for infusing fruit with humectants by coating dry fruit such as raisins by spraying or immersing the fruit with the desired humectant or humectants as described specifically in the Background of the Invention in U.S. Pat. No. 5,000,971. One of the processes described is an infusion technique utilizes the process of immersing the dried fruit with the humectant in a wasteful manner so that excess humectants are forming pools over the extended period of time needed for the infusion to occur and these pools of humectants are generally not desired for reuse. Another process described is a spraying technique wherein the humectant is sprayed on the dried fruit over extended periods of time with losses of humectant on dripping from the dried fruit during infusion. U.S. Pat. No. 5,000,971 is specifically directed to a process for carefully spraying without forming pools of humectants followed by tumbling the sprayed dried fruit and waiting four weeks for the infusion to occur. A major drawback associated with the immersion of dry fruit with a humectant especially glycerol with raisins is that an equilibrium is established where the glycerol is diluted with the components which come out of the raisins. Sugars, water, flavors and other components are the principle diluents. Removal of some of the raisin flavor is highly undesirable. Some food processors regard the resulting diluted glycerol solution of such composition as being sufficiently changed composition as to be unsuitable for extended immersion or repeated immersion of raisins and the resulting decanted liquid glycerol solution becomes a disposal problem. This is not only a problem from the economic perspective, in view of all the wasted glycerol but is also a problem from the environmental perspective, inasmuch as the waste material has a high biological oxygen demand.
There remains, however, a present need for a process capable of treating dried fruits so that these products retain all of their natural flavor, remain soft, flavorful and of good color for extended periods of time. It is also desirable to provide a process which will be less energy intensive than known infusion techniques where large energy inputs are required.